Just after a 20-year-old shooter made an attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life last Saturday, a host of Republicans rushed to blame Democrats and the media for the shooting.
They include Ohio U.S. Senator and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno. They also include Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia even posted on X that the district attorney of Butler County, Pennsylvania, where the shooting took place, should file criminal charges against President Joe Biden.
All rushed to judgment in the hours after the shooting. Some did so even before the shooter’s identity had been released. Yet four days later, the shooter’s motives are unknown and even the basics about his politics remain vague.
But one fact seems clear. The two most prominent Ohio players in the post-shooting blame game have in the past compared Trump to the most noxious fascist of them all — Adolph Hitler.
Spokespeople for Vance and Moreno didn’t respond to requests for comment on statements the two made about Trump, whom they were against before they were for.
On Saturday, just two hours after a 20-year-old took shots at Trump, Vance took to X to blame Biden.
“Today is not just some isolated incident,” he wrote. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
In February 2016, Vance sent a text message to a former Yale Law School classmate in which he made an even starker comparison about Trump.
Vance said he’d been going “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
Trump is under federal indictment on charges that he tried to steal an election that he lost, he’s called to “terminate” the Constitution over his loss, he’s embraced political violence and police brutality — and he’s called his political opponents “vermin.”
In saying — repeatedly — that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” the former president clearly rhymed with Hitler, who several times used the same metaphor to attack Jews and any other “race” that he considered inferior to “Aryans.” Of Jewish men who “allow” Jewish women to marry Christians, Hitler said, “He poisons the blood of others but preserves his own blood unadulterated.”
It might seem that some of the rhetoric stems from Trump’s own words and actions. It might also seem that the rush to blame others for the shooting was really an attempt to bully people from speaking publicly about Trump’s anti-democratic conduct.
But to Moreno, the GOP challenger to Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, blame for last week’s shooting lies with the media and Democrats.
“They’ve been calling (Trump) Hitler for eight years,” Moreno said in a recording that his campaign posted on X. “The shooter is 20 years old. From the time he was 12 years old, they’ve been telling him (Trump) is the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler. If you could take a shot at Adolph Hitler in 1935, would you be a good person or a bad person? That’s how (the shooter) viewed it. That’s on them. It’s on them, meaning the Democrats, and also on the mainstream media.”
But on Moreno’s Twitter account in 2016, Moreno himself comparing Trump to Hitler. In a now deleted post, the future Senate candidate retweeted a poll featuring Trump and Hitler, and he appended a comment.
“He attacked immigrants, tries to silence the press, & appeals to the darkest part of human nature,” it said.
Moreno didn’t say to which man he was referring. But his use of the present tense is telling, given the fact that Hitler was 70 years dead at that point.
Moreno’s spokeswoman was asked for examples of the press comparing Trump to Hitler for the past eight years. She was also asked whether Moreno worried that blaming press and political opponents for Trump’s attempted assassination would paint targets on their backs, given all the armed, unstable people there are.
She didn’t respond.
MARTY SCHLADEN
